By an overwhelming vote of 94-3, the Senate has confirmed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to be the next Secretary of State.

The vote was met with a long round of applause from those in the Senate chamber for the 28-year Senate veteran. He appeared on the floor, greeted by hugs and congratulations from his fellow senators.

Kerry voted “present,” in the vote for his promotion. Kerry will take office in the shadow left by outgoing Secretary of State Hilary Clinton…
Republican senators Jim Inhofe, Ted Cruz, and John Cornyn were the only dissenting voters, with Cornyn’s spokesman offering that the senator couldn’t go along with the vote because “Sen. Kerry has a long history of liberal positions that are not consistent with a majority of Texans.”"

Why is it that Feinstein (D) thinks she deserves special privileges that she actively tries to prevent the rest of us from having. We are not her subjects. Lawmakers should not be allowed to make laws from which they exempt themselves.

The fact that this particular law would not only be foolish and counterproductive, but likely Unconstitutional to boot just makes it all the worse.

"Hey, they’ve gotta have someone who can sell high-powered firearms to Mexican drug cartels, amirite? You’ve heard about the 158 weapons you’ll no longer be able to use. But what about the exemptions?

Not everyone will have to abide by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s gun control bill. If the proposed legislation becomes law, government officials and others will be exempt.

“Mrs. Feinstein’s measure would exempt more than 2,200 types of hunting and sporting rifles; guns manually operated by bolt, pump, lever or slide action; and weapons used by government officials, law enforcement and retired law enforcement personnel,” the Washington Times reports.
More on exemptions, from the Huffington Post:

Finally, the bill includes a number of exemptions: It exempts more than 2,200 hunting and sporting weapons; any gun manually operated by a bolt, pump, lever or slide action; any weapons used by government officials and law enforcement; and any weapons legally owned as of the date of the bill’s enactment.
I’m always confused by how liberals— the segment of the population most obsessed with constantly telling us of our country’s sins, its government’s brutal overreaches, its occasional tyranny, and its fundamental disregard for the justice it promises— suddenly decide the idea of governments becoming tyrannical is a paranoid delusion once the wary citizen is a gun owner. Presumably you’re only allowed to believe the government might become tyrannical and still be a respected political figure and college professor if your weapon of choice was a nail bomb meant for Ft. Dix."

Considering that Congress was not in recess at the time, this decisions makes perfect sense to me. If confirmed by the Supreme Court, not only would it remove the people Obama put in place, but it could (and likely would) undo or reverse all of the rulings or actions taken by the NLRB since their installment.

"It took more than a year, but a federal appeals court has finally caught up with Barack Obama and his unilateral declaration of a Congressional recess. In an embarrassing rebuke, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Obama violated the Constitution by making appointments while the Senate considered itself in session:

President Barack Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel, a federal appeals court panel ruled Friday.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Obama did not have the power to make three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board.
And as the AP also points out, the decision was unanimous … and embarrassing:

The unanimous decision is an embarrassing setback for the president, who made the appointments after Senate Republicans spent months blocking his choices for an agency they contended was biased in favor of unions.
The ruling means that a full year of work from the NLRB will go down the tubes, if the Supreme Court upholds this ruling. The three appointments allowed the panel to form the quorum necessary to pass decisions. Now every ruling made by the NLRB will be delegitimized as soon as those harmed by the rulings take this into court. What a mess — and an unnecessary mess at that:

The Obama administration is expected to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but if it stands, it means hundreds of decisions issued by the board over more than a year are invalid. It also would leave the five-member labor board with just one validly appointed member, effectively shutting it down. The board is allowed to issue decisions only when it has at least three sitting members.
It wasn’t just the three appointments to the NLRB, either. Obama appointed Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose appointment ran out when the 112th Session of Congress expired earlier this month. The appointment is being challenged in a separate case but in the same circuit, which means we can expect a similar ruling."

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

"Women in all branches of the military soon will have unprecedented opportunities to serve on the front lines of the nation's wars.

Leon Panetta, in one of his last acts as President Obama's defense secretary, is preparing to announce the policy change, which would open hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs after more than a decade at war, the Pentagon confirmed Wednesday.

The groundbreaking move recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff overturns a 1994 rule banning women from being assigned to smaller ground combat units. Panetta's decision gives the military services until January 2016 to seek special exceptions if they believe any positions must remain closed to women."

Here’s a transcript (the cameraman missed the first paragraph). The past Monday I decided to visit the Minuteman Park in Lexington and pay tribute to Captain John Parker and his fellow minutemen. A thought came to my mind, that the founding fathers of the United States and Chairman Mao had one thing in common: they all realized that guns are important political instruments. Their similarities, however, ended there:
Chairman Mao wrote: ‘Political power grows out of barrel of a gun’, and he dictated: ‘The party shall command the gun’. James Madison and his compatriots, however, believing that the power of the state is derived from the consent of the governed, ratified that ‘the right to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Close your eyes and you would be in good company thinking you were listening to a State of the Union instead of an Inaugural.

My favorite part: "“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed." (excerpt from)

It is seriously bad form to bag on the person who is the reason for the celebration, and his shots at other people were also in bad taste given what the tenor of the event should have been. Still, where are all the big free speech people?

1. Confiscation of "assault weapons"
2. Confiscation o ten round clips
3. Statewide database for ALL Guns
4. Continue to allow pistol permit holder's information to be replaced to the public
5. Label semiautomatic shotguns with more than 5 rounds or pistol grips as "assault weapons”
6. Limit the number of rounds in a magazine to 5 and confiscation and forfeiture of banned magazines
7. Limit possession to no more than two (2) magazines
8. Limit purchase of guns to one gun per person per month
9. Require re-licensing of all pistol permit owners
10. Require renewal of all pistol permits every five years
11. State issued pistol permits
12. Micro-stamping of all guns in New York State
13. Require licensing of all gun ammo dealers
14. Mandatory locking of guns at home
15. Fee for licensing, registering weapons"

"Last month, PolitiFact selected its "Lie of the Year." Given PolitiFact's dubious record of singling out Republicans for lying far more often than Democrats, you probably could have guessed the winner of this particular sweepstakes was a Mitt Romney campaign ad:

It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign -- that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep's parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

"Public expressed collective outrage"? That's essentially wishcasting on the part of PolitiFact, nor are they accurately representing what Mitt Romney said in the ad. In fact, here's PolitiFact's original "fact check" on the matter:

[Mitt Romney] Says Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs.

Ok. Now here's what the Reuters reported earlier this week:

Fiat (FIA.MI) and its U.S. unit Chrysler expect to roll out at least 100,000 Jeeps in China when production starts in 2014 as they seek to catch up with rivals in the world's biggest car market. ...

"We expect production of around 100,000 Jeeps per year which is expandable to 200,000," [Chrysler CEO Sergio] Marchionne, who is also CEO of Chrysler, said on the sidelines of a conference, adding production could start in 18 months.

There not sorry, and the damage has already been done. Prisoners have already used the information to intimidate guards, and it is almost certain that the information they released will be around in one form or another indefinitely.

"A pang of conscience after not one but two homes listed on the map were burglarized, possibly with an eye to finding guns inside? Of course not. The new New York gun law that just passed includes a provision, as a sop to gun-rights supporters, allowing gun owners to restrict public access to their information going forward. The Journal News yanked the map because they were violating the spirit, if not the letter, of a new law that was enacted as a direct response to what they’d done.

The publisher posted a statement this afternoon informing the public of the change and the fact that she’s emphatically not sorry:

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, the Journal News thought the community should know where gun permit holders in their community were, in part to give parents an opportunity make careful decisions about their children’s safety…

Today The Journal News has removed the permit data from lohud.com. Our decision to do so is not a concession to critics that no value was served by the posting of the map in the first place. On the contrary, we’ve heard from too many grateful community members to consider our decision to post information contained in the public record to have been a mistake. Nor is our decision made because we were intimidated by those who threatened the safety of our staffers. We know our business is a controversial one, and we do not cower.

But the database has been public for 27 days and we believe those who wanted to view it have done so already. As well, with the passage of time, the data will become outdated and inaccurate.
Rotten garbage aimed at justifying a transparent attempt to intimidate gun owners. I don’t know how else to read the first paragraph except as an accusation that if you own a gun, however lawfully and however clean your record is, then you’re inherently dangerous or at least more dangerous than the average joe. In that case, if this is all For The Children, why not publish a map of everyone in the county who’s been convicted of a violent offense instead? And it’s also a transparent lie that everyone who wants to view the map has already done so. Apparently, some convicts were using it to let their prison guards know that they should sleep with one eye open."

"Breitbart has the scoop on the Obama administration wondering whether we all just can’t pretend that Operation Fast & Furious — the deadly gunrunning scheme and the subsequent investigation, coverup, invocation of executive privilege, and Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress — maybe just never happened at all. If we could sweep this whole thing under the rug and just go about our business, that would be really super awesome, guys:

Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice have asked a federal court to indefinitely delay a lawsuit brought by watchdog group Judicial Watch. The lawsuit seeks the enforcement of open records requests relating to Operation Fast and Furious, as required by law.

Judicial Watch had filed, on June 22, 2012, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious and “specifically [a]ll records subject to the claim of executive privilege invoked by President Barack Obama on or about June 20, 2012.”

The administration has refused to comply with Judicial Watch’s FOIA request, and in mid-September the group filed a lawsuit challenging Holder’s denial. That lawsuit remains ongoing but within the past week President Barack Obama’s administration filed what’s called a “motion to stay” the suit. Such a motion is something that if granted would delay the lawsuit indefinitely.
Mm hmm. The DOJ is arguing that this lawsuit should be subject to a stay because of the separate lawsuit already filed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but does anybody else get the distinct impression that the administration, for whatever reason, has a very definite interest in these documents never seeing the light of day? Eric Holder’s function as a “heat shield” for President Obama must be darn near priceless for his sketchy record of, at best, egregious incompetence, to warrant him a second shot as head of the DOJ."

"A computer virus attacked a turbine control system at a U.S. power company last fall when a technician unknowingly inserted an infected USB computer drive into the network, keeping a plant off line for three weeks, according to a report posted on a U.S. government website.

The Department of Homeland Security report did not identify the plant but said criminal software, which is used to conduct financial crimes such as identity theft, was behind the incident.

It was introduced by an employee of a third-party contractor that does business with the utility, according to the agency.

DHS reported the incident, which occurred in October, along with a second involving a more sophisticated virus, on its website as cyber experts gather at a high-profile security conference in Miami known as S4 to review emerging threats against power plants, water utilities and other parts of the critical infrastructure."

Shredding the Constitution in the middle of the night. When this fails to have any real positive impact on crime, as is inevitable, it will be used by those on the left to justify shredding the Constitution even more.

"President Obama is slated to announce his decisions on gun-control proposals for the nation tomorrow, but New York Gov. Andrew “confiscation could be an option” Cuomo has already charged forward with new laws for his state:

New York on Tuesday became the first state to approve a comprehensive set of gun control laws in response to last month’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, amid concerns among gun owners that the spate of changes to local and state gun laws could make them targets of overzealous politicians and prosecutors.

The New York Assembly gave final approval to the bill late Tuesday afternoon — Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed it within minutes.

New York’s new laws will expand the state’s ban on assault weapons and include new measures to keep guns away from mentally disturbed individuals. Under the new law, ammunition magazines would also be restricted to seven bullets, from the current 10 — owners caught with eight or more bullets in a magazine could face a misdemeanor charge. The law also prohibits Internet sales of assault weapons and in another provision, a therapist who thinks a mental health patient is making a credible threat to use a gun illegally would be required to report the incident to the state.
Well, the New York legislature passed the measures and sent them on to Cuomo, so they at least went through the full-court channels rather than executive action, hem hem, but the whole thing does seem rather inappropriately hasty:

Governor Andrew Cuomo is trying to lead the nation in gun control, but he’s picked a peculiar way of doing it. Mr. Cuomo negotiated in secret with a few other powerful politicians on a dog’s breakfast of legislation that got no public discussion at all and was passed by state senators who had not even read it—because they were not given a chance to do so.

The resulting bill is hard to judge on the merits. It’s a snarl of good ideas, strange ideas and ideas that seem quite bad. While some items should figure into federal gun control legislation, Washington should not take New York as an example of how to go about this difficult business.
As New York state Senator Greg Ball said on the floor last night, this doesn’t seem to have quite as much to do with well-thought out, legitimate efforts to make everyone safer as it does with a 2016 Democratic contender’s strategic feel-good attempt to take a big national lead on the progressive cause du jour — high-capacity magazine bans are not effective at preventing tragedy, and they make self-defense all the harder."

"A Daily Caller analysis of the administration’s “2012 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff” shows that while women comprised about half of the 468 staffers — as the president touted during his press conference Monday – they also earned about 13 percent less, on average, than their male counterparts.

The median 2012 salary for female employees of the White House was $62,000; for men that number was $71,000."

I am usually not one to demagogue, but after careful contemplation there really is just no way around it. Firearm restrictions disproportionately hurt the poor, while being more of a nuisance to the middle and upper classes. As someone who is not poor, while I find overbearing restrictions on firearms repugnant as a clear violation of both the letter and intent of the Constitution, my life will really not be impacted as negatively*.

My immediate family, as well as my extended family, are middle to upper-middle class. I am well on my way to being in that same spot as well, if I am not there already. There is no reason to think that my future children, and those of my extended family, will not be similarly situated in life, so the potential impact is unlikely to change.

What does it mean to be in that upper-middle class? It means I live in a nice relatively crime free area, work in a nice relatively crime free area, and travel through nice relatively crime free areas to get to and from work. If that stops being the case and crime takes hold where I work, live, or travel, I can move with relative ease. That means the bulk of my life will be spent where crime is relatively scarce.

What does it mean to be in that upper-middle class? It means that unless the laws become so draconian that all future firearm sales are banned and all current firearms are illegal and must be turned in and destroyed, I have the means to either acquire new firearms and/or keep any firearms that I may have/get. What ever the hoops that must be jumped through, whatever the added fees and taxes, any extra piles of paperwork, ultimately those hurtles are not insurmountable. I can afford to pay them, as well as any people that are needed to act as guides to cut through the red tape.

What does it mean to be in that upper-middle class? It means that even if those draconian laws are passed, if I felt it absolutely necessary, I have the means and connections to acquire and hide an illegal firearm. I may not have David Gregory (NBC) level clout, but I would have enough to ensure I would be apologizing to a judge about my gun law ignorance instead of hearing my future wife give a description to the police of the man who raped her and murdered our children.

What does it mean to be in that upper-middle class? It means that I can afford an alarm system and safe room, and I/we have the political connections to make sure that the state allocates disproportionate resources protecting our neighborhoods and keeping us safe [to the extent police can actually protect anyone or keep anyone safe] relative to the poor. If you are 'upper' enough, it also means that you can afford to hire private security guards.

What does it mean to be in that upper-middle class? It means that if the government ever starts turning tyrannical, or starts showing signs that it thinks the world would be a better place if my ethnicity or religion were purged from humanity, I have the means to get out of Dodge in a hurry. Not only could I leave if I had to, but I could bring enough and have enough in the financial cloud that I would not be destitute when I got to my destination. It would be a hit, obviously, but I would have enough of a cushion to reestablish myself in my new home.

What does it mean to be poor? It means you are trapped living and working in crime ridden areas with no way of escaping. It means that even the most cursory firearm restrictions will disproportionately prevent you from having legal access to the weapons you need to defend yourself and your family (which, given where you live and work, you may arguably have a more pressing need for than the upper-middle class). It means that you may not have the means to acquire an illegal firearm, even if you desperately need it. It means you probably do not have an alarm system or a safe room, and you are unable to convince the government to increase police patrols in your neighborhood (as they are busy patrolling the relatively crime free affluent neighborhoods). It means that if the government turns tyrannical your choice is to become a subject to the ruler or spend the rest of your life as a political prisoner in a windowless cell; and that is if you are lucky. If you are unlucky and you belong to the ethnic or religious group that the government wants to purge you have a one way ticket to the ovens, and with no effective means to fight back your only real choice is to decide which family member you want to say goodbye to first.

When you stop to think about it, the disproportionate impact of firearm restrictions on the poor is clear as day. These restrictions render the poor unable to acquire and possess the means to adequately defend themselves and their families, while being more of a irritant or nuisance to those of means. Fight for the right the Second Amendment guarantees because it is the right thing to do in the name of liberty, but also do it for the poor.

*Just to be clear, if the government decides to shred the Constitution and in the process trample on our basic freedoms my life will impacted negatively. The poor however, will feel that pain much more acutely than I will.

"I blogged about this last month, remember? At the time, the only evidence was a few YouTube videos of people on gurneys, wheezing. Seemed hard to believe that Assad would shatter the taboo against using WMD for an attack so small-scale as to leave some doubt that WMDs were actually used. And yet here we are.

The slow news cycle is over:

The consul general’s report followed a series of interviews with activists, doctors, and defectors, in what the administration official said was one of the most comprehensive efforts the U.S. government has made to investigate claims by internal Syrian sources. The investigation included a meeting between the consulate staff and Mustafa al-Sheikh, a high-level defector who once was a major general in Assad’s army and key official in the Syrian military’s WMD program.

An Obama administration official who reviewed the document, which was classified at the “secret” level, detailed its contents to The Cable. “We can’t definitely say 100 percent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23,” the official said…

Many believe that Assad is testing U.S. red lines…

“The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable,” Obama said Dec. 3, directing his comments at Assad. “If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.” That same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added: “we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”
Follow the link up top for a description of the victims’ symptoms. More than 100 people were allegedly stricken with respiratory problems; five of them died from choking on their own bronchial secretions. The day after it happened, the Syrian American Medical Society spoke to some of the victims and released a report identifying the likely culprit as, indeed, Agent 15:"

"A WHITE HOUSE PETITION TO Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them. “Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.”"

"Aaron Swartz was an internet activist and developer who hung himself on Friday. This talk below that he gave will be a more enduring legacy than any software he ever made, or any of the crimes he's been accused of.

Ignore the hipster douchebag affectations and pay attention to what he's saying. He lays out a process by which irresistible force can be resisted even when the media is NOT on your side. Its not theoretical, it worked.

When the video started, I was groaning for the first 20 seconds or so, which of course was due to my biases and preconceptions about this young man, but then he drew me in...and 20 minutes had elapsed before I knew it."

This really is a travesty of justice. A law was broken and there is clear evidence of that (with an apparent confession/admission), yet this this violator will get off with a mere warning while others have had the book thrown at them. The only apparent difference is that David Gregory is famous were the others were not.

This may be a stupid law, but it is the law, and the law must be applied equally.

"Ed Schultz wants so badly to make the case that strict gun laws actually reduce gun violence that he said on his show last Friday that New York City has less gun violence than Chicago because Bloomberg has implemented the strictest gun laws in America. In Chicago, he said, gun laws don’t even exist. Seriously.

Apparently Ed hasn’t done his research because Chicago has among the strictest gun laws in America. In fact the State of Illinois was just given 180 days to come up with new gun laws because the old ones were so strict they violated the 2nd amendment."

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

My first wish for you in 2013 is the same as 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009; may this year be more interesting then the last. People still tell me this is a curse, but the opposite would just be just awful.

It will once again will follow it up with my favorite toast from my grandfather; may the best of your past be the worst of your future.

I shall end again by paraphrasing and expanding a concept from Martin Luther King Jr. and Firefly; 'Life is about moving forward. If you can't run, you walk. If you can't walk, you crawl. When you can't crawl; when you can't do that, you find someone to carry you.' This year find someone new who will carry you, and that you would carry as well.